Verstappen happy to be back on course after Monaco

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Fifth place on the grid for Sunday's Canadian Grand Prix might not have been quite as good as Max Verstappen was hoping for, but he was nevertheless happy to get back on form after a dreadful Monaco Grand Prix experience two weeks ago.

"Of course not great," the Red Bull Racing driver admitted when asked how he felt after crashing out at Monaco. "You start thinking about what happened again and... yeah, I am always hard on myself. So, yeah, definitely after Monaco, you don’t like what happened and it shouldn’t happen again.

"I think three days after Monaco at one point you have to get over it and start working ahead and that is definitely what we did," he said.

"And I think this whole weekend actually was pretty strong. Here we are in the top-five and we have a lot of possibilities for tomorrow.

"Could have been fourth, but definitely not third, but it was okay," he added. "I enjoyed it in general the whole weekend so far. Of course we wish to be a little bit closer to the Mercedes, but on the other hand we are also not too far off.

"This is not normally the strongest track for us, but we are not too far off [the Mercedes cars]. If we go to other tracks again we have a very competitive package."

Verstappen admitted to being startled by just how fast Sebastian Vettel had been so far this week.

"It is a little bit surprising that Sebastian pulled out such a good lap at the end. We are two or three tenths behind and like I said, in the race we should be a bit closer. They can turn up their engines a bit more for qualifying. Still a lot of chances for tomorrow.

"I think they still turn it up a bit - not like Mercedes, but they can turn it up."

Even so, Verstappen was clearly hoping that he would be able to capitalise on his grid position for the start of tomorrow's race and get past one or more of his team mate, Vettel and the two Mercedes to hopefully land himself a podium position.

"I think anyway our car is quite good in the race. Hopefully with a little bit of rain that will help us out," he said.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.